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Objective-C Programming for Legacy iOS Applications

Objective-C has been a part of Apple’s programming ecosystem since ancient times, even before Swift showed up and turned things upside down. Mixing up the basic features of C with a method of communication derived from Smalltalk, it creates a programming language that is very different from the majority of modern languages. One of the reasons its dynamic runtime was so sought after is the headroom for the developers to do even the most drastic changes, like adding new behaviours, changing the classes, or even replacing the method implementations without having to stop the application. This flexibility was a big factor in the creation of complicated macOS and iOS applications that were meant to use a variety of hardware and system capabilities and at the same time be very adaptive.

Today, most developers prefer Swift mainly because of its short code, and at the same time, Objective-C has been and still is an important language for Apple. The reason is that a considerable part of Apple's frameworks and a large number of applications that are still in use today are written completely or partially in Objective-C. Therefore, it is necessary to have a very good knowledge of the language as well as being familiar with concepts such as categories, protocols, and message passing when it comes to maintaining and updating these systems. The syntax sometimes gets the label of verbose, but by the time the developers become proficient, they start to love every bit of it, especially when it comes to naming the methods and organising them.